Technical Field
The technology relates to machine vision, and to electronic processing of captured images to identify a substantially constant number of interest points in the captured images even though the images may contain appreciably different objects.
Discussion of the Related Art
The detection of interest points within electronically-captured images is useful for a variety of computer-vision applications. For example, interest point detection may be used in machine-implemented methods for image matching, localization, mapping, and/or object recognition. Examples of interest points include, without being limited to, edges, corner, ridges, localized contrasted regions and blobs. For machine-vision applications to operate satisfactorily, a suitable number of interest points may be required to be identified and processed per image frame. If too few interest points are used, a machine-vision application may fail to recognize an image or an object in an image, for example. On the other hand, if a large number of interest points are used per image frame, the image-processing application may yield accurate results. However, a large number of interest points increases the processing burden on the system, and may undesirably slow down or, in some cases, overwhelm an image-processing system such that image processing may not be capable in real time or important data may be lost.